Abstract

During Rudolf Bultmann's early life , he attempted to unite scholar and laity through his understanding of the person of God. He passionately strove to present a consistent understanding of God to himself, fellow scholars, his students, and the laity in the protestant churches of Germany. His consistent understanding of God developed in the context of his home and its love for the common people of the church, the legacy of Schleiermacher, Marburg Lutheran Neo-Kantianism, the eschatological perspective of the History of Religions school, dialectic theology, and Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Throughout this development, Bultmann always insisted that God is the inner forces of life within the human; this belief was the common feature of his understanding of God during this period. However, in the process of these developmental stages, Bultmann came to hold that Lutheran Neo-Kantianism provided the basic structure by which to analyze, critique, and strengthen his understanding of God. In light of this Neo-Kantian structure, Bultmann insisted that God cannot be the formulation of any scientific, ethical, or artistic construction. By this Bultmann meant that God cannot be the object or manifestation of human reason in any form; God transcends human reason. Hence, through the assistance of the dialectical theologians and Heidegger, in 1925 Bultmann presented his purest formulation of a Neo-Kantian understanding of God: God is the spontaneous moment of encountering the dialectical forces within our existential being. For Bultmann, herein lies the union of scholar and laity: whether one is a theological scholar or a peasant farmer, the presence of God is revealed in the same manner--God is the dialectic force within our existential being. For this reason, Bultmann proclaimed in the churches and in the halls of academia that the union of laity and scholar as well as one's own personal life are dependent upon a passive reception of the revelation of God within us and an active embrace of that revelation by faith